I had the distinct pleasure of going down to Huntington Beach to catch Robby Armstrong’s act live. You wouldn’t believe the energy Robby exudes when he’s singing and playing on the guitar. Meet Emily Kilimnik, the awesome fiddler behind the music in Robby Armstrong’s original musical score he wrote, produced and directed for Samuel T. Moore of Corte Magore, my children’s picture book slated to release on 7/1/13. Robby Armstrong is one very talented individual and I can’t wait for you to hear the amazing music he created for a crab trying to find a home. Click Here to Watch Talented, Emily Kilimnik, on the Fiddle
Earlier this week, Jerry Bock (perhaps best known for Fiddler on the Roof) passed away, the day after he was honored with Lifetime Achievement Award from the Dramatists Guild. Below, Philip Lambert remembers the great composer.
By Philip Lambert
When Jerry Bock died on November 2, three weeks shy of his eighty-second birthday, the American musical theater lost one of its most expressive, gifted composers. With lyricist Sheldon Harnick, Bock wrote the scores for three of the most celebrated musicals Broadway history,
Fiorello! (1959),
She Loves Me (1963), and
Fiddler on the Roof (1964), and for four other excellent shows during a fourteen-year partnership (
The Body Beautiful, 1958;
Tenderloin, 1960;
The Apple Tree, 1966;
The Rothschilds, 1970). His work stands as a testament to the value of musical craftsmanship, dramatic sensitivity, and artistic generosity on the Broadway stage.
After an apprenticeship in early television, and at Camp Tamiment, a summer camp for adults, in the early 1950s, Bock made his Broadway debut with three songs in a revue, Catch a Star! (1955). At that time he wrote mostly with Larry Holofcener, whom he had met at the University of Wisconsin. Bock and Holofcener also teamed with George David Weiss to create a star vehicle for Sammy Davis, Jr., Mr. Wonderful in 1956. But when Bock began working with Sheldon Harnick in 1957 – they were introduced by a mutual friend, Jack Cassidy – his music began truly to blossom and sparkle. Bock and Harnick wrote hundreds of songs of infinite variety in support of disparate stories and characters. Feeding off each other’s formidable talents, the partnership thrived until an array of forces sent them their separate ways in the early 1970s. After that Bock mostly wrote his own lyrics for other new shows, including a very successful series of musicals for young audiences between 2000 and 2007, and music for a feature film (Sidney Lumet’s A Stranger Among Us, 1992). He also worked on personal, private songwriting projects during the last four decades, yielding autobiographical song cycles (Album Leaves, Trading Places) and thematic collections (Noblesse O’ Blues, Three/Four All).
Jerry Bock was the master of what Lehman Engel called the “musical costume.” He could dress up a song in any style, from the nineteenth-century parlor song (for Tenderloin) to the jazz shouter (in The Apple Tree). He would immerse himself in the style and culture of the story he was helping to tell and then transport the audience there with musical references and flavorings. In She Loves Me he took us to Hungary, in The Rothschilds to the power centers of eighteenth-century Europe. In his most successful show, Fiddler on the Roof, he drew from his own background and heritage to evoke a turn-of-the-century Russian shtetl. Of that experience, he said in 2008, “I simply could not stop the brood of melodies and harmonies that waited to be born.”
There was, in other words, no single Jerry Bock “style.” His style was simply an acute sensitivity to the dramatic requirements of the project at hand. He and Harnick would work tirelessly on each of their scores searching for perfect dramatic support, during development, rehearsals, and pre-Broadway tours, usually producing two or three times the number of songs a
